Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (review)

While Invention of Hysteria quickly became a defining work in French cultural studies more than twenty years ago, its recent English translation is likely to generate new sparks in such diverse fields as psychoanalytic theory, feminist criticism, and visibility studies. Didi-Huberman astutely traces the trajectories of two colliding forces in the France of the mid-nineteenth century: the "rediscovery" of the diagnostic category of hysteria and the quickly-evolving applications of photographic technology. The locus of this collision was in the infamous Salpêtrière, the Parisian asylum for madwomen, now forever linked with its most renowned clinician, Jean-Martin Charcot.

Much has been written on the definitional obscurities of hysteria, a fin-de-siècle diagnosis reserved almost exclusively for women, both overapplied and overconstructed by physicians of the age. Charcot excavated the study of hysteria from arcane medico-mythology dating from Hippocrates, and reinvested the notion of the "wandering womb" with a new belle époque sensibility. The list of possible "causes" of the illness were absurdly disparate: nervous shocks, pneumonia, exaggerated religious practices, membership in certain professions, races, and religions, and perhaps most tellingly, a variety of sexual behaviors, including masturbation, "venereal excesses," and sexual continence (72). As Didi-Huberman synopsizes, hysteria in the nineteenth century was "the symptom, to put it crudely, of being a woman" (68).

Didi-Huberman exposes the artifice of Charcot's trademark observational practices, professed to be both non-invasive and non-interventionist. In fact, inmates were sometimes bribed before their appearances in weekly lectures, and the clinic's in-house photographers subjected them to various forms of posing, props, and lighting before documenting "authentic" displays of their patients' hysterical symptoms. Such practice slyly found its manipulative power not only in prompting behavior, but also in then presuming the right to interpret it. Didi-Huberman makes this hypocrisy glaringly evident: whether in the lecture hall, the examination room, or the photography studio, how can there be spectacle without staging and direction? Just as all performance presupposes an audience, so did Charcot's hysterics perform hysteria, in a reciprocal rapport of spectacle and spectator.

During his tenure at the asylum, Charcot oversaw the development of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, a multivolume work cataloguing women in different stages of hysterical attack. In theory, the collection was meant to serve as an archival resource and as a pedagogical tool (from which reprints could be made and distributed among those interested in the Salpêtrière's well-documented hysteria studies). Didi-Huberman deftly brings to light the telling overlap between Charcot's new-sprung methods of clinical experimentation on hysterics and the still-adolescent technology of photography. Following a long history of looking to facial expression as a means of revealing mental processes, psychiatric photography "took the form of an art of the portrait" (49). Indeed, as many of the text's illustrations reveal, the conventions of portraiture are all in place: oval framing, dramatic lighting, aesthetically-chosen camera angles, the costuming of the hysteric-model (often selected for her beauty over her symptomology).

Didi-Huberman invests his study with special pathos by devoting the second half of the book to Augustine, Charcot's most well-known and most oft-photographed patient (not yet sixteen when admitted to the Salpêtrière). In a kind of simultaneous seduction, she held particular sway over her doctors as an especially prolific performer of hysterical symptoms, while herself being manipulated into serving as the leading lady of Charcot's famous Tuesday lecture series and his growing photographic collection. She was, in effect, the Salpêtrière's hysterical headlining act. With a certain narrative flair, the author waits until the final chapter, "Show-Stopper," before divulging the circumstances of Augustine's ultimate escape from the asylum.

This work evokes comparisons with American Diane Arbus's photographs of the insane, taken roughly a century...